The Bergdahl Chronicles: Murky Is As Murky Does

The end of the day yesterday was enlivened by the news that several of the soldiers currently calumnizing Bowe Bergdahl were being prepped for the job by several ratfckers of the Republican kind, including a famous Twitter commando who once was tasked with keeping John Bolton's meds on schedule. One of the most serious charges levelled was that several American soldiers died in the search for Bergdahl who, it was said, had deserted his post. CNN also has jumped on this narrative with both of Jake Tapper's feet. Of course, the former consideration is shadowed in history by the fairy tale of Jessica Lynch, the lies occasioned by the death of Pat Tillman, aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, balsa wood attack escadrilles, the bullshit about babies being ripped from incubators in Kuwait, and yellow rain. The fact is that the propaganda industry simply has become better at doing its job than the elite news business is. In situarions like this, truth, because it is complicated and it runs in many directions at once, simply never catches up with the narrative.

But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive - even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault. All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.

Of course, the facts are unclear. This was a war conducted in a place that once was considered the very ends of the Earth and hasn't changed very much. It was a war conducted amid tribal groups that had been killing each other for centuries for reasons lost to history. It would be a damn miracle if everything about these events wasn't unclear.

Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America's war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.

And isn't that ironic as hell? In the battle with the propaganda industry, one way that the news business can make it a fair fight is through the work of leakers and whistleblowers. Just sayin'.

Separately, context supplied by the leaked logs complicates claims that insurgents attacked the outpost because of the hunt. Insurgents had been shooting at the outpost with escalating intensity in the preceding months. A June 24 log described a mortar attack inside its perimeter and cited intelligence that insurgents were planning a "complex ambush" of the outpost. And a log recounting the July 4 attack said it confirmed "recent reporting regarding Mullah Sangeen's desire to conduct a spectacular attack" against the outpost. The log did not mention the hunt for Sergeant Bergdahl. Still, one soldier from Sergeant Bergdahl's battalion said that response time after the attack had been slow, and argued the issue was not if the outpost was going to be attacked, but rather when insurgents chose to attack it.

The important thing to remember as the ratfcker's clients continue to appear on TV is that what they are saying about Bergdahl's disappearance and its aftermath is purely opinion. It is informed opinion. It is opinion worthy of respect, but it is opinion nonetheless, and it will remain that way until such time as an official investigation determines as closely as it can what actually happened. And, to paraphrase Wilt Chamberlain, opinions are like Fox News Contributors. Everybody's got one.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, mostly recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.